Waterloo kitchen

WATERLOO — In 1962, in a home on Erb Street, Angie and Bill Graham were raising five children in the middle of a thriving industrial area in Waterloo’s downtown.

The Snider’s Flour Mill was right behind them. The Seagram’s whiskey plant was across the street. Carling Brewery was nearby. Machine shops and factories across Waterloo and Kitchener were busy.

Bill was working off and on as a labourer, while Angie supplemented the family income by selling her popular homemade bread. Both came from entrepreneurial families. Bill’s family had been in the restaurant business – running Graham’s Grill until it closed – and Angie’s father, Sam Fardella, built the Grand Theatre in Fergus.

Angie and Bill had dreamed of running their own restaurant and in 1962, they made their dream come true, converting part of their Erb Street home into a small diner with about 30 seats. Angie’s Kitchen was born.

It became a landmark that survived the huge changes that have swept across the region over the past 50 years, including the demise of manufacturing in the downtown area. Educational facilities and research institutes have replaced the factories that used to be the restaurant’s neighbours.

Today, there are two restaurants, one on Erb Street in Waterloo and another in the village of St. Agatha. They are run as separate businesses.

The Angie’s Kitchen name is owned by Angie’s son, Michael Graham, and his family, who run Angie’s Country Kitchen, in St Agatha. It has about 30 employees and combines the traditional Angie’s dining experience with a banquet and catering business.

The original Erb Street restaurant, recently rebranded as “Angie’s since 1962,” is owned by Angie’s daughter, Teresa Huegle, and her family. That location employs about 15 people.

Graham and Huegle have vivid memories of the spirit and energy of their mother Angie, who was widowed just two years after the restaurant opened. “She was always a good cook and she was thrifty and frugal,” Graham says. “We had a little garden in our backyard and she was able to pull enough stuff out of that garden to feed us all.”

Angie was widely known for her kindness and hospitality. Graham recalls people gathering around their kitchen table to enjoy his mother’s homemade bread, which was where the Angie’s Kitchen name was born. “She would start baking bread on a Friday night and on Saturday, she would bake 16, 24 or 30 loaves of bread in a regular oven like they had back in the 1960s.”

The restaurant “was their dream,” Huegle says of her parents.

Graham recalls his mother pulling fresh pies out of the oven at 9 p.m., before train engineers would come in after their train pulled into the barrel yards at nearby Canada Barrels. “My mom would go to bed at 10 p.m. and my dad would stay until midnight. It was nothing to sell 10 to 15 pies between 9 p.m. and midnight.”

The little restaurant offered everything “from soup to nuts,” Graham says. “If you wanted veal parmesan, you got veal parmesan. If you wanted liver and onions, you got liver and onions.” It was standard workers’ fare, “because that’s what Waterloo was at that time,” he says – a working-class, industrial town.

When Graham was a young child, Seagram’s employees working overtime would call in orders for dinner. “For about $4.25, they would get a rib steak with potatoes and veggies.” Graham and his siblings would carry meal boxes, piled so high they could hardly see where they were going, over to the plant.

Things went well until June 20, 1964, just before Father’s Day. That night, Bill Graham was hit by a drunk driver as he was crossing the street in front of the restaurant. “We woke up on Father’s Day morning and our dad was in the hospital. He lived for nine days,” Graham says. “It was horrible, for all of us,” Huegle adds.

Suddenly, their mother was a widow with five children, ages 6 to 15, and a restaurant to run. In those days, insurance policies were not large, Graham adds.

Later that year, Teresa, the oldest child, was pulled aside by her Italian grandfather. He told her she needed to quit school because her mother was tired and needed help. Teresa had just turned 16. “I said, ‘what about my friends? What about school?’ But he said girls didn’t need an education like boys did and my friends would come and see me.”

After Teresa was trained to fully run the restaurant, the exhausted Angie took five weeks off to go to her sister’s place in Hamilton to regroup. It was a tough year. But Angie’s Kitchen survived and carried on.

Teresa stayed until she was 18. Then, after she went to Expo 67 with her cousin and tasted “freedom” for the first time, she moved to Toronto. “I went all over the place and did all kinds of crazy things,” she says.

Angie carried on with the restaurant in Waterloo, assisted by her other children, especially Mike, who was 16 then. The restaurant expanded to about 100 seats, filling the area that was once the family’s living room, dining room and sun porch.

A few years after she left, Teresa called and asked her mother if she could come back. In 1971, Teresa and Mike became partners in Angie’s Kitchen. Six years later, they bought the St. Agatha location. It was an old, dilapidated hotel that dated back to 1864. There had been a fire so it was burned out. “When you walked into the front, it was totally burned out and black and all the floors had caved,” Huegle recalls.

It took almost two years to restore the building. While work was ongoing, the family cleaned up the front so that they could do Christmas parties.

Angie’s Country Kitchen in St. Agatha had space for small weddings and business meetings, as well as room for catering equipment to do large banquets and cater large events held elsewhere. “We became a commissary,” Graham says. “We baked the bread and the pies in St. Agatha and sent it to Waterloo. If there was a banquet for 1,000 people somewhere, we could do the cooking from St. Agatha.”

Both restaurants still offer menus that cater to a wide range of tastes. Huegle notes that Angie’s was popular with a wide range of people, from factory workers to high-tech professionals, because it provides “comfort.”

Graham says Angie’s Country Kitchen in St. Agatha has been, and always will be, the type of place where a group of 10 people can get a good dinner for $15 each and enjoy an outing.

Huegle is painting and refreshing the 50-year-old Waterloo location. The menu is staying pretty much the same, but she is updating that too. She notes that when Angie’s Kitchen started, there weren’t many restaurants. Most of today’s fast-food and chain restaurants didn’t exist then.

“It is a lot more competitive now,” she says. But she welcomes the competition. “People said to me, ‘Oh, you have a Cora’s coming in,’ and I said, ‘Good.’ When the Duke of Wellington opened, someone asked me, ‘What are you going to do?’ I said, ‘Well, I hope they see my sign’.” People might eat at the Duke of Wellington one day, and come to Angie’s the next, she says.

Running a restaurant is a tough business. “But you can’t give up,” Graham says. “You just have to have the faith that you are going in the right direction.”

He and his sister inherited their optimistic nature and passion for business from their mother, who died of a heart attack in 1997. “She was a powerful, strong woman,” Huegle says. “She was very positive and any negative became a positive. So you have to live it, breathe it and do it. You wouldn’t make it without the passion.”